You scale marketing to the price of the listing, which feels like ordinary business sense: small commission, phone photos. She refuses to, because the seller deciding whether to hire you is judging what you did for somebody else's house, not theirs.
A top producing agent in the Louisville area was interviewed about how video changed her business. The host asked a practical question — how does she decide which listings get a full home tour video?
Her answer was that there is no deciding. "Every single listing that I market, whether it's a vacant lot or a house of any value, gets the same level of service, which includes professional photos as well as professional video."
She does not pretend the cost is nothing. For a newer agent on a budget, she says make it the end goal, and the goal is to do for all that which you're willing to do for one. Her reasoning is that she is building a brand, not marketing one house. She describes the version she wants to avoid: someone sees the video of an expensive listing, asks her to market their modest home the same way, and gets something less.
Then she gave the proof from that same day. She had a listing appointment at one o'clock with sellers in their late seventies who had already bought their next house. Before she walked in, the seller had gone to her platforms and cited several of her recent videos back to her. As she put it, the seller had already made a judgment about her professional presence before she got through the door.
“Every single listing that I market, whether it's a vacant lot or a house of any value, gets the same level of service, which includes professional photos as well as professional video.”
The listing you shoot on your phone because the price is low is the exact listing a future seller will find, because that is the neighborhood they live in. Tiered marketing does not read as good business to a homeowner, it reads as a ranking, and they can see which tier they are in.
The change is that this becomes a policy you can say out loud on a listing appointment rather than a decision you make privately per file. It is also the cheapest way to make the appointment shorter, because the seller has usually already checked.